TRADING PLACES / Philanthropist and psychologist Norman Stone divides his time between Pacific Heights, home of his cutting-edge art collection, and Hunters Point, where he counsels inner-city clients

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 16, 2006

Photo: Christina Koci Hernandez

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Norman Stone in front of painting, "Balloon Dog," by artist Jeff Koons, 1996, in his dining room. Stone at home with his art collection in Pacific Heights. Stone, 67, is the heir to a large fortune but has always worked as a psychotherapist in the Bayview/Hunter's Point area. A lot of his art collection, he says, mirrors his experience with the issues he sees as a therapist. Miroslav Tichy, a photographer, whose work he collects will be mentioned in the story.. (CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/THE CHRONICLE)) Mandatory Credit For Photographer and San Francisco Chronicle/No-Sales-Mags Out less

Norman Stone in front of painting, "Balloon Dog," by artist Jeff Koons, 1996, in his dining room. Stone at home with his art collection in Pacific Heights. Stone, 67, is the heir to a large fortune but has ... more

Photo: Christina Koci Hernandez

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Norman Stone, at home in his living room, in front of piece by artist, Dieter Roth, "A la Maison," 1975-78. Stone at home with his art collection in Pacific Heights. Stone, 67, is the heir to a large fortune but has always worked as a psychotherapist in the Bayview/Hunter's Point area. A lot of his art collection, he says, mirrors his experience with the issues he sees as a therapist. Miroslav Tichy, a photographer, whose work he collects will be mentioned in the story.. (CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/THE CHRONICLE))
*Norman Stone (cq) Mandatory Credit For Photographer and San Francisco Chronicle/No-Sales-Mags Out less

Norman Stone, at home in his living room, in front of piece by artist, Dieter Roth, "A la Maison," 1975-78. Stone at home with his art collection in Pacific Heights. Stone, 67, is the heir to a large fortune ... more

Photo: Christina Koci Hernandez

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Photo: Liz Mangelsdorf

TRADING PLACES / Philanthropist and psychologist Norman Stone divides his time between Pacific Heights, home of his cutting-edge art collection, and Hunters Point, where he counsels inner-city clients

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The silver Porsche sticks out amid the aging cars and pickup trucks at Third and Jerrold streets, in one of San Francisco's edgier neighborhoods.

Its driver seems out of place, too. But Norman Stone, Pacific Heights philanthropist, art collector and high society star, is a regular at the local mental health clinic, where he has counseled crack addicts and other patients since 1980.

At 67, he no longer works full time, clocking in just two days a week. His practice is an essential part of his life, although as a billionaire's son, he has never needed a day job to make ends meet.

While Stone has been featured nationally in stories about his provocative contemporary art collection, he has kept quiet about his career. He recently agreed to talk for the first time about what his work has meant to him and how it has influenced his collecting, relationships and philanthropy.

"It's a wonderful balance for my life," Stone said. "I don't shock easily, I sadden easily. I've heard most of the bad things that people can do to one another, the way people can ruin their lives."

His caseload at the government-funded clinic at Bayview Hunters Point Foundation for Community Improvement, recently renamed the 4301 Family Center for its Third Street address, runs the gamut from patients with sexual and spousal abuse to drug use, depression and schizophrenia.

"There have to be really serious problems for the state to want to pay for therapy," he said. "Existential problems don't really (qualify for counseling) in community mental health."

The plight of troubled poor people is hardly the stuff of cocktail party chitchat, where the unwritten rule of conversation ordains that topics be light, not lofty, so that even if one never has a meaningful exchange, nothing unpleasant will ruin the party, either.

By day, he rolls up his Prada shirtsleeves to hunker down in the drab, windowless clinic for eight hours twice a week, helping people put their lives back together. By night, he's on the party circuit in patterned Gucci tuxedoes, sipping champagne.

"The first year or two, it was an adjustment," he said. "You have to learn to shift gears. If you bring everyone's problems home, you aren't going to survive as a therapist."

Contrast is one of the keys to Stone's life.

Born in 1939, he was raised in Evanston, Ill., one of three children in a family headed by W. Clement Stone and his wife, Jessie. Stone's father started an insurance company with $100 in 1922; by the time of his death in 2002 at the age of 100, it had grown to a $2 billion concern. His father also wrote several self-help books, coined the phrase "positive mental attitude" and was a staunch backer of Richard Nixon's 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns -- his personal donation of $6 million influenced the institution of campaign spending limits by Congress.

Norman Stone, however, grew up to be a Democrat who flunked out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during his freshman year, in part because the senatorial scholarship arranged by his father's attorney and granted by the Illinois Legislature required participation in ROTC.

"I didn't like the idea of the military," he said. "I had no intention of serving."

He enrolled in business courses at a two-year college on the East Coast and transferred to Stanford University his junior year, graduating with a degree in economics. He married a fellow student when he was 20, and they had four children. Three sons live in the Bay Area and a daughter resides in Connecticut.

Stone worked in venture capital for several years, and with his first wife, Karen Fernstrom, started Nueva Day School in Hillsborough, a private school for gifted children. But he didn't like business. His marriage failed.

He veered in the opposite direction, dabbling in classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. He lacked the talent to be a painter, but gained insight into his personality.

"If you stand in front of a blank canvas for eight hours, sooner or later you figure out how your mind works," Stone said. "I realized I was intuitive."

At the same time, Stone had been volunteering as a counselor at a program for at-risk youth funded by his father's private foundation. He felt good about helping people and, in 1977, enrolled at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, a graduate school in clinical psychology. He earned a degree in 1985 and was licensed by the state in 1987. An internship in 1980 brought him to the Hunters Point clinic, where he has counseled ever since.

"I'd always felt really guilty about coming from an affluent family and being so privileged, and after working at the clinic for about five years, working with people who were smarter and nicer than I was, I realized it was just a fluke of ovarian luck that I happened to be born into this particular family," Stone said. "I realized I no longer felt guilty, because I felt I like I was doing my part, giving back to the world in a positive way that would make the world better for my having been here."

In his other life, Stone and his second wife, Norah Sharpe Stone, a former corporate attorney, are darlings in the high society scene, a modern-day Nick and Nora Charles. They came to art collecting together in the 1980s, and are guided by consultant Thea Westreich in New York. Stone is a trustee at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and his wife is chair of the institution's Director's Circle. They also have ties to the Tate Gallery in London and the Whitney Museum in New York.

The couple are known for their playful attire at charitable fundraisers, elaborate biennial costume parties in Napa Valley, and general joie de vivre. One year, when the costume theme was black and white, Stone appeared in a suit with a jacket made from bubble wrap. On a summer trip to Germany with friends, Stone encouraged video art collector Pam Kramlich to go for a swim -- down the Rhine River -- as her husband, Dick, and Stone's wife cheered them on. Stone recently gave up running but plans to bungee jump from New Zealand's tallest bridge on a trip Down Under this fall.

"Being around them is the opposite of boring," Kramlich said. "They're very exuberant and refined in their imagination, in the way they live life."

When not collecting art, Stone produces Azalea Springs Merlot from grapes grown in vineyards at the Calistoga property.

He and his wife are turning the grounds into an art showcase, with a swimming pool and outdoor pavilion project that will turn the water and sky into different colors, thanks to fiber-optics lighting systems installed by light artist James Turrell, and construction of a 5,000-square-foot "art cave" being hewn into the limestone hillside, where they will display and store art.

Stone said his exposure to gritty contemporary issues at work has informed his taste in contemporary art.

Crack addicts, AIDS patients and, increasingly throughout the years as handgun violence has grown more common, family members grieving over shooting victims have sought his counsel.

And so it was the state of mind of the Czech artist Miroslav Tichy that piqued Stone's interest in acquiring several pieces. The painter-turned-photographer makes surreptitious, voyeuristic photos of women in various states of undress with crude, handmade cameras. As a young man, Tichy was forced into mental hospitals and prison during the Communist era for being "different," according to the Times of London.

A Bruce Nauman sculpture, the phrase "run from fear -- fun from rear" done in colored neon, also caught Stone's fancy, for its sexual ambiguity.

"When Norah was bidding on it at auction in New York, there was a guy they had to remove from the auction room who was screaming that it was an obscenity," Stone said. "I think it's funny, but that's what makes it a powerful piece. People project whatever meaning they want onto it."

Then there's the famous "Red Butt" by Jeff Koons, a portrait of the artist and his first wife, Italian porn star-turned-politician Cicciolina, engaging in anal sex. (Installed in the bedroom of the Stones' summer home, it was a highlight for snooping guests for many years, until it was sold recently.)

"Neither of us were interested in collecting 'pretty pictures,' " Norah Stone said. "We love our collection. If we gave our money to the Symphony or Opera, we could enjoy a performance. With art, we can live with it in our home, having it stimulating us and keeping us asking questions."

Stone's daily exposure to troubled patients also informs his charitable giving. He is the president of the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation, which will give $4.5 million in 2006 to a variety of programs focusing on education, as well as childhood and youth development, across the country. Among the 55 recipients of a total $1.2 million in grants in 2005 were Coleman Advocates for Youth in San Francisco, Youth in Focus in Oakland and the New Teacher Center in Santa Cruz.

"Everything we do is in large part to help disadvantaged people better their lives," Stone said.

With the advent of Stone's career, his daughter, Amy, 36, observed a transformation from a somewhat superficial life to one with purpose. On a visit to San Francisco before he remarried, she recalled seeing him poring over his dissertation note cards, spread out around his apartment.

"I would ask if he were going to go into private practice and he said it was never an option for him," she recalled. "He'd say, 'I'm not interested in listening to long and lengthy conversations from people I might see at a cocktail party.' Pulling up in his Porsche in this impoverished community in Hunters Point is where he felt at home."